What purchase changed your life?

[filmfan]

Hewes reels-- the only perfect photography product.

 

[kbg32]

My 1973/'57 reissue Les Paul Standard that was stolen in 1980. My 1967 M4.

 

[DNG]

Paying for the Marriage license :bang:

 

[Richard G]

The C Sonnar 50, and C5 (Citroen) - the latter's curtain airbag keeping me alive to buy also the 21 C Biogon.

 

[zauhar]

My M3 changed my life.

Randy

 

[johannielscom]

A Rollei SL26.

It came in a leather pouch, had the 40mm standard lens on it and was pristine. I picked it up at a flea market for EUR 1,50 and sold it within three weeks for EUR 80,00.
It was the beginning of a long career in buying and selling gear that has so far helped me and my family finance education, travel, books, music, concerts, magazine subscriptions, and nice camera gear.

I still buy gear cheap (both online and on flea markets etc) and sell it at a profit. And it still pays for other nice stuff. Most always the profits are only 10, 20, 30 bucks but it adds up.

Sometimes I pick up stuff that never sells again and I ship it off in the X-mas Give-Away threads that we had here over the last years.

 

[Charles Binns]

My first decent Camera a Nikkormat ftn, 1971 , my first Leica, a IIIg which I still have,1975 and my latest - an M9, Deep Joy!!

 

[Particular]

A black Nikon F2. This was my first camera back in the mid seventies when I was in art school. At that time I use to be very shy around women, but that camera, along with being a standout in the art department, lead to me meeting more women than I could handle. It was a lucky camera.

I gained a lot of sexual experience directly due to that particular camera. Somehow I became the Photo Editor and Darkroom manager for my school's newspaper, and somehow the darkroom also became a sex parlor...

Cal

At one point someone at my college messed with the plug to the enlargers so the ground wire (and the enlarger) became live. That was the biggest buzz I ever got in a school darkroom.

 

[petronius]

Nikon FM in 1979
"Dune" in 1980
Macintosh Classic II in 1993

 

[Marc G.]

The purchase of my M6ttl with the 50 Summilux asph, both in chrome.

never gonna sell that camera again

 

[denizg7]

paying for school books.. because the cost of school wasn't enough..

 

[Cold]

Photographically, for me, my D80.

Decided months before the purchase that I wanted to take my photography more seriously, and spent those months learning about all the options I didn't know that my P&S wasn't giving me. Read, learned, deliberated, then picked it up used.

Over the next few years, I really cut my teeth with that thing, thus, I was a bit more upset than I might have otherwise been when it was stolen out of my car a few months ago. 🙁

A close second, however, would be a Canonet QL17 G-III that I bought almost 2 years ago that started me down the path of film again for the first time since I was a young child. This has led to several more film cameras, all of them rangefinders, raging at pharmacy development, learning to develop at home (as a result of the raging), and starting the slow process of getting over my own insecurities to try street photography.

 

[mugent]

Travel, I've never regretted a penny spent on holidays, even the places I didn't have fun, it still leaves an impression, in a good way.

Objects, my first Mac, it's pretty much dictated my career up to this point.

 

[jenquest]

A simple point and shoot digital camera. I paid around £120 for it back in 2001 and it allowed me to take thousands upon thousands of pictures with instant feedback re. composition etc.

 

[Calzone]

At one point someone at my college messed with the plug to the enlargers so the ground wire (and the enlarger) became live. That was the biggest buzz I ever got in a school darkroom.

I had my own private sex parlor/darkroom and office. The only problems I had was when people would pound on the door and say, "I know you are in there, open the door." LOL.

The stool was at the perfect height...

Cal

 

[jsrockit]

At one point someone at my college messed with the plug to the enlargers so the ground wire (and the enlarger) became live. That was the biggest buzz I ever got in a school darkroom.

Well, I had a girl that looked like grimace from McDonald's try to put the moves on me in the color darkroom... which has no safelight. I escaped... but not without some minor scrapes and bruises.

 

[Godfrey]

I often glance at what people just sold, bought, regretted purchasing, love, but I was was wondering what purchase changed your photographic philosophy, or photography in general.

"The Americans" by Robert Frank. Bought a used paperback copy of the 1968 edition in 1971. Still have it, still marvel at what Robert Frank could see in that book.

More recently, "Seeing is Forgetting the Names of the Things One Sees" a book about conceptual artist Robert Irwin by Lawrence Wechsler.




Equipment is transitory. Photographs ... and Ideas ... endure.

 

[nikon_sam]

Let's see there are a few...Photographically speaking...

Tripod
Nikon SB-25
Weston Ranger 9
Nikon 135mm lens...My very first real Nikon lens...
Nikon F4e
Mamiya m645

Things not related to Photograpy...our first house...

 

[Ezzie]

Wrt photography, the MTL-3 in 1983, and thr R-D1 in 2009.

But more importantly my SIII Land Rover, bought in 1999. Without which I would never have met my wife, and not had my two children, which when all is told, is the meaning of life.

 

[Roger Hicks]

An airline ticket to California in 1981.

Before that, trying my girlfriend's Leica II in 1969 (I persuaded her to buy it for twenty quid, about $45-50 at the time).

Cheers,

R.